Call for opinions: default naming policy for USB network interfaces: MAC/path/kernel?

[Sebastien Bacher]

Hey Martin,

Le 14/04/2016 03:50, Martin Pitt a écrit :
> So we got one vote from Aaron in favor of moving to location-based,
> and some further analysis from Steve (who didn't seem to like
> location-based much), so not a clear direction here. Which probably
> means to keep the status quo for 16.04 final? 16.04.1 is our next
> change to address that (we can't chagne the schema for upgrades
> anyway).

Sorry for not replying earlier, as you said none of the options are 
optimal and I wanted to sleep a bit on it before commenting.

On the location based option you wrote that it creates issues when you 
connect e.g an usb dongle to another port, but then you commented that 
it doesn't matter because nm handles it fine. Do we know of any case 
which wouldn't work for normal desktop users going through nm then? Do 
we have any element in our desktop stack relying on the name?

It seems from a desktop perspective there is no much difference between 
the options, especially if nm handles things dynamically. We don't show 
those names to users much (nautilus uses labels where it can and non 
technical users are probably not paying much attention to the names 
displayed e.g in the current connection info), though having the name a 
bit shorter than the full MAC would be nice.

In summary I think that any of the options is fine for desktop and there 
is no clear winner for the other usercases, so it probably makes sense 
to stick with what we have for the release and see what feedback we get 
and revisit if needed for .1.

Cheers,
Sebastien Bacher